India - The Melting Pot Simmers by Frank Hyland and Animesh Roul

India - The Melting Pot Simmers
By Frank Hyland & Animesh Roul
http://counterterrorismblog.org/

The single most important job we have as Intelligence Officers is to alert policymakers to impending crises. CT experience makes one a firm believer in and proponent of The Casey Stengel Theory of International Terrorism. Casey (and others) is reported to have said of the game of Baseball: “It’s a very simple game - Just hit it where they ain’t.” The saying, like another one - “The enemy of my enemy……” explains a great deal in few words. Looking at the world in this way helps forecasters like we are begin to wave the red flag of Terrorism Threat Warning before the attack. Although it is at least as much an art as it is a science, the process is a fairly straightforward one. Those who do CT have seen that, in virtually every terrorist attack, the Pre-Incident Indicators (PII) were there in hindsight if only they had been noted.

Typically, the problem progresses along a continuum through recognizable stages. It begins with political unrest, continues through progressively more strident episodes, and culminates in attacks ranging from “small” (small except to the loved ones of those killed and wounded) to large. The pattern was there in the Occupied Territories, in Lebanon, Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand, the UK, even in the United States. With most eyes focused on Iraq and Afghanistan nowadays, it’s not difficult for US and allied policymakers to miss another “pot” that has been simmering its way along the aforementioned continuum - India. There is much more to be said about the situation than can be fitted into these spaces, and CT Blog will do that in upcoming segments, with this article serving to set the scene.

Factors both geographical and philosophical (including political) converge to disguise somewhat the severity of the situation. India is known, of course, as the world’s largest democracy. For another, India is officially a non-Muslim nation, but one that abuts the Muslim nation of Pakistan. There is no shortage of examples around the world where a non-Muslim area contiguous to a Muslim area has been the scene of endless conflict. This example, of course, has added drama in that both India and Pakistan are nuclear powers. As a related subtheme, India also administers the disputed region of Kashmir. The border line drawn by a 19th Century colonial power obviously did not cleanly separate Muslim from Hindu. To add to India’s Islam-related woes, members of a non-Muslim minority - the Sikhs - have also been responsible for attacks against the government in the past, including the 1984 assassination of India’s Head of State, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. That incident, in turn, was in revenge for the government’s storming five months earlier of the Sikh’s Golden Temple in Amritsar, with the loss of almost 300 lives. Add to that over a billion people stuffed into an area only one-third the size of the United States, and it is such a volatile mixture that it may be a tribute to India and Indians that there isn’t more internal strife.

Follow-ons to this article will discuss the individual groups and threats within and surrounding the putative melting pot of India, from Maoists to Jihadists and in between. The implications for US policymakers, too often prone to having to put out “brush fires” rather than looking down the road, will also be discussed.
January 10, 2008 02:51 PM Link